Become an Affiliate Yourself and Earn Income

Consider this: Joining an affiliate program, in addition to offering one,
can be a big benefit to your company. Not only can you add valuable content
to your site that will keep consumers coming back to you, but also your offers
will be there in front of consumers whenever they are ready to buy.

Shoppers do not live on commerce alone. They go to the Web for information
as well. By joining selective content affiliate programs, you can add free
valuable content to your company's siteand get paid for it in the
process. Why would a content site give you free information and pay you to
do it? For the same reason you create an affiliate programto acquire
customers and increase revenue. So why not capitalize on your site traffic
and gain additional revenue in the process? In addition to your company becoming
an affiliate, it should be mandated that members of your affiliate team create
their own sites and become affiliates so they can have a 360-degree understanding
of the industry.

As the old saying goes, "What's good for the goose is good for
the gander." Your affiliatesboth content and community sitesare
outsourcing their commerce to you, so why don't you outsource your content
to someone else by joining their affiliate program and add value to your site?
And here's the best partyou get paid for it! You can capitalize
on your site traffic, offer valuable content to your shoppers, and gain additional
revenue in the process.

DO

DO join content affiliate programs to add valuable content to your site and
earn additional revenue at the same time.

There are a number of companies on the Web today that offer all kinds of
content that could fit well on your Web site, and many of these companies will
pay you to place their content on your site or link to their content from your
site.

Why would they do this? For the same reason you create an affiliate
programto acquire customers and increase revenue. They do this by creating
tiny content packages that you place on your Web site, and in return, you feed
traffic back to their site. Their give-away content is a link back to full
content hosted on their site. And here's the best part: This valuable
content is FREE and there is no cost to join their affiliate program.

These affiliate programs come in many flavors, and there's a very good
chance that one of them would fit your e-commerce site. You can find content
sites that provide

News of all types

Articles on many subjects

Web search services right from your site

Local news, weather, entertainment, and events

Sports and stock information

Downloadable music, photos, and Webcasts

Auctions

Even consumer reviews and opinions

Quality content can help you attract potential buyers to your site, but
quality content is a lot more expensive to create than most people realize, and
maintaining a quality Web site is an even more expensive proposition. If you can
reduce your content costsand even make money doing itthe viability
of your e-commerce site may come down to how well you can manage content costs.
That's why joining content affiliate programs will help you add quality
content to your site and get paid for doing it.

News and Features

If your eBusiness serves a local market, you could consider joining an affiliate
program that offers local news, weather, entertainment, and events. AOL Digital
City's affiliate program (home.digitalcity.com/chicago/)
(see Figure 3.1) lets you offer guides to
local restaurants, clubs, attractions, live music, museums, art and cultural
events, movies, and more. You just add one of its local content boxes to your
site and every time someone clicks on that box, you get paid $.03.

For more general news, affiliate programs from InterestAlert! and Strategy.com
can fill the bill. InterestAlert! (interestalert.com/remote/siteia/affiliate.html)
(see Figure 3.2) lets
you put news headlines and summaries on your pages. Categories include top news
stories, women's news, political news and commentary, sports news, a stock
index, and a large variety of industry news. Your site gets paid $.0025 per
paid view on the news pages they serve.

Figure
3.2 InterestAlert! lets you put news headlines and summaries on your pages
from a variety of categories.

Do join content affiliate programs that
allow you to customize their content to your site.

By becoming an affiliate, you can offer your customers personalized finance,
weather, and news information. When your shoppers subscribe to these services
(co-branded with your logo and your Web site's look and feel) through your
site, they can choose what information they want (earnings reports, local
severe weather alerts, top world news, and so on), when they want it (if
a stock moves by 12%, only when rain is in the forecast, Thursdays at 10 a.m.,
and so on), and how they want to receive it (via e-mail, mobile phone,
pager, and so on). Your business receives 15% of the net revenue generated by
your site and 5% of the net revenue generated by other sites you refer.

Another free news feed affiliate program is EchoFactor (http://www.echofactor.com/affiliate.html).
If your company sells music, you can have a news feed on Britney Spears. If
your company is involved with travel, choose a news feed on a specific city
or destination. EchoFactor pays $2 for each news feed you place on your site.

Moreover
(http://www.moreover.com/associate/)
provides breaking news from 1,800 sources, and it pays a commission every time
you refer a new Web site owner who puts a Moreover headline Web feed onto his or
her site. Moreover pays $1.30 for each unique visitor who completes the
three-step Web feed builder, and $2.00 for each unique completion when the
visitor is referred from the Moreover news feed on the front page of your
site.

There's also an affiliate program for one of the biggest content providers
on the Web. When you join About's affiliate program (http://affiliates.about.com/index.htm),
you can take advantage of a wide range of quality content from over 700 of its
expert guides. Each guide specializes in one area and provides in-depth information
on his or her subject. You can link to an individual guide's content that
is relevant to your company's interests. You can also add the ability for
shoppers to search exclusively within your topic area, or search the entire
About network. About will pay a standard rate of $0.01 for each qualified click-through
from your site to About.

Some niche affiliate programs offer content as one of their linking options
(see Figure 3.3). ClubMom (http://www.clubmom.com),
a free membership organization created exclusively to reward and celebrate moms,
makes a new article (with affiliate links) available to affiliates each month.
Similarly, the One and Only Network, a matchmaking and romance site, offers
a number of articles to affiliates that are integrated with affiliate links.
These niche affiliate programs provide the valuable content to affiliates to
improve the caliber of their sites and to reach a very defined-target marketing
audience.

Figure
3.3 About offers affiliates access to hundreds of thousands of pages of
content in more than 800 categories of information.